Rustom-2, India’s medium-altitude long-endurance drone being developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation, is targeted to achieve a huge milestone in April when it will take off from its test range in
Karnataka’s Chitradurga to fly for more than 18 hours at a height of over 27,000 feet, people familiar with the development said.

Rustom-2, also known as Tapas-BH (Tactical Airborne Platform for Aerial Surveillance-Beyond Horizon 201),
successfully completed the last flight test in October last year when it successfully flew for eight hours at an altitude of 16,000 feet.

“This will be a huge step,” said a senior government official about the
indigenously-developed unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) designed for strategic reconnaissance and surveillance operations. Rustom-1
India’s previous efforts to develop military hardware hadn’t been very successful in the past, forcing the country to import more than 60% of its military requirement. India is the world’s third-biggest military spender in the world after the United States and China.
The drones, officials said, was one of the areas where India lagged behind and ended up relying on pricey imports from countries such as the USA and Israel.

China, which has invested heavily in military equipment over the years, has raced ahead in this sector also.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which tracks global arms flows, China has not just built drones for the People’s Liberation Army but also exported 163 large weapons-capable UAVs to 13 countries from 2008 to 2018. It even gave four Wing
Loong II armed drones to Pakistan to protect the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and Gwadar port.

The hard push to Rustom-2 is seen in the context of the continuing efforts to indigenously produce cutting-edge military equipment. Last year, the government unveiled plans to ban
the import of 101 types of weapons and ammunition over the next five years ranging from artillery guns to conventional submarines and missiles.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi formally handed over the indigenous battle tank Arjun Mark 1A to the Indian Army as part of
this renewed focus on achieving self-reliance in the defence sector. Less than a fortnight earlier, the Cabinet Committee on Security headed by PM Modi decided to award Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) a ₹48,000-crore contract to supply 83 LCA Mk-1A jets to Indian Air Force.
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Hindutva does not belong to Modi nor his party, it belongs to the people as a unifying, decolonial ideology similar to pan-Africanism or Yugoslavism.

His own brand of "positive secularism" is even milder - deepening special rights and welfare schemes for religious minorities.


After the disbanding of the Hindu Mahasabha and Jana Sangh, Hindutva as a political ideology does not even exist, except as a bogeyman in the minds of the Anglophone elite.

Even the BJP gave up Hindutva for civic nationalism, Gandhian socialism, and positive secularism in 1980s.

Under Modi, there has been compete policy continuity on minority rights and welfare from the Congress era, with little to no "Hindutva agenda" coming to see the light of day.

The most radical policy they can dream of is religion-neutral laws and equal rights for equal citizens.

Hindutva was essential in forming a national consciousness, but was abandoned with time. The modern BJP refuses to self-identify as a Hindutva movement, adopting moderates like Sardar Patel, Deendayal Upadhyay, and JP Narayan as their icons, rather than Savarkar or the Mahasabha.

When they say Hindu Rashtra, all they mean is an "Indic polity".

When British India was partitioned into a Muslim homeland and a Dharmic homeland, one state became a 'Ghazi' garrison state, and one the successor state to the Indic

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